The History of Brickman!
It was 45 years ago this month, in November 1979, when I published the third issue of my fanzine After Image. It carried a mixture of strips and articles and on the back page of the slim 14 page publication was a new character I'd created... Brick-Person!
Wait, Brick-Person, not Brickman? Yes, because I felt that as every superhero was something-man or something-woman it'd be funny just to call him Brick-Person. The character was of course a spoof of Batman, with comedy inspired by the Batman TV show, and in this scenario it's the protagonist's parents who turn out to be villains. Loose Brayne's father is revealed to be The Poker! I had a "soft launch" for After Image No.3 at a local social club. Truth to tell it was just me handing out copies to my mates so they could read it in the bar. Here's a photo of that November night in 1979, back when I had a bit more hair and poor taste in shirts. (Please note I didn't have an afro. That's just a shadow caused by the flash!)
As it turned out, I decided that would be the final issue of After Image. Sales hadn't been great so I needed a rethink. Two years later in 1981 I launched a new fanzine, Metamorph No.1, and that contained the continuation of Brick-Person's cliffhanger where Loose Brayne's mum turns out to be Gnatwoman!
I still wasn't satisfied with the strip though, and I don't just mean my crude art style of the time (athough that made me cringe). With the third issue of the 'zine in 1982, now renamed Fantasy Express and a focus on British comics, Brick-Person became Brickman. He'd also gained a partner, Tina Trowel, AKA... er, Trowel!
Ever restless in those days, I ended Fantasy Express with issue 5 in 1983 to focus on working in comics professionally. Brickman had proven popular though so I decided to put him in his own mini-comics: Blimey! It's Brickman, Brickman on Toast, and the part-reprint The Early Brickman.
This gave me the chance to revamp Brickman a bit more. His debut story and the awkward revelation of his parents being The Poker and Gnatwoman was completely written out of Brick-history and a new Poker and Gnatwoman made their debuts with no connection to the originals.
By 1985 I was busy as a professional comic artist so Brickman was on the back burner again until Martin Lock, publisher of Harrier Comics, invited me to come up with a replacement for my Rock Solid strip that had been running in the early issues of the anthogy comic Swiftsure. I thought this was a good opportunity to revive Brickman once more so a new one-off three pager appeared in Swiftsure No.6. This was followed in 1986 by Brickman getting his own Harrier comic, which included guest pages by my friends Dave Gibbons, Kevin O'Neill, Mike Collins and Mark Farmer, with an intro by Alan Moore and a back up Cloak story by Mike Higgs. Quite a package that I'm still proud of.
The conclusion of that Brickman story ( a 20 pager called The Brickmania Caper) saw Brickman quit and head off into the sunset... perhaps forever? Not quite. For the next few years I had Brickman or his alter-ego Loose Brayne make anonymous cameos in the various other comic strips I worked on, such as Loose Brayne being a stallholder at the fair in this Combat Colin strip from Marvel's Action Force No.6 in 1987...
...and as a Brickman who'd forgotten who he was in this Combat Colin story from The Transformers No.245 in 1989...The reason I didn't disclose his name in that story was so that I could retain copyright, but after Marvel UK returned all rights on Combat Colin to me I changed that panel when I reprinted it so he introduced himself as Brickman. The daft knight remained in limbo until 1996 when I created a brand new Brickman story for my new self-published comic Yampy Tales...
Here's the opening splash page of the story. As you may have gathered, Brickman was never aimed at children. Some people assumed it was for the Beano age group because of my art style but I always considered the demographic to be teenagers and older. Incidentally, when this 1996 story was reprinted in 2005 I had to change the plane into an alien, as it was too close for comfort in the post 9/11 world. Brickman ran in Yampy Tales 2 and 3 (the final issue), concluding with him riding off into the sunset again. I'd intended that to be the end of the character, but he has a habit of returning!
In 1997 Chrissie Harper asked me to ink a photocopy of Jack Kirby's pencils of a Captain America illustration, replacing the Red Skull with Brickman! The page appeared in No.11 of Chrissie's Jack Kirby Quarterly...
In 2005, my old Marvel UK editor Richard Starkings, now a successful writer and lettering artist in America, offered to publish the entire Brickman saga in a 152 page digest size softback. Under his Active Images imprint, Brickman Begins appeared, bringing the stories to a new audience in the USA. Bonus pages included legends such as Tim Sale, Charlie Adlard, Hunt Emerson and Alan Davis depicting their versions of Brickman!
The book included a brand new four page prologue I created that could segue into the reprints...
Richard Starkings also invited me to create brand new Brickman strips as a back up feature in his award winning Elephantmen comics that were published by Image Comics. With each episode being a full colour page, the series ran from 2006 to 2009...In 2015 I decided to get back into self publishing as a sideline to my mainstream comics work. My first title was Brickman Returns, gathering all the stories I'd done for Image Comics into one publication... At the end of that comic, Brickman retired again, and I thought that would be his swan song...
...but not just yet! Earlier this year I reprinted a couple of Brickman stories in Lew Stringer's Comic Sampler, an anthology of some of my "best bits" from comics over the years...
...and... I'm currently creating a brand new series of Brickman and Trowel mini-strips that will appear in a new British comic set to debut in 2025! It's all hush-hush for now but more news on that in a few months' time hopefully!
Brickman will return... again!
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