Latest news headlines

'Miss London' graphic novel
A recently completed urban odyssey.
27th March 2007

'Drawing and Painting Fantasy Worlds'
A new book published by David and Charles.
27th March 2007

New Books Due in Autumn 2007 and Spring 2008
The Fantasy Artist's Pocket Reference Volumes I and II.
27th March 2007

Diary: Secret Passages
The Chronicles of a Myth Hunter
Regular updates direct from Finlay on MySpace.
27th March 2007

Diversions

Links to things mentioned on this page.

Subway Slim
A new website focusing on Finlay's graphic novels.

Corto Maltese
The official site.

Hellboy
Mike Mignola's Hellboy stories.

Philip Pullman
Author.

Tintin
The classic.

Steve Canyon
Wikipedia on Steve Canyon.

Natasha Grey
Russian/French esoteric author living in St Petersburg. Writer on the Great Game and the Indian Mutiny. Official biographer of Finlay Cowan. No website - contact through Finlay.

Purchasing 'Miss London'

Collectors First Edition of 300 copies of Miss London available by subscription only.

In the great literary tradition of Sir Richard Francis Burton's issue of the Arabian Nights, Finlay will publish a collectors First Edition of 'Miss London' when a list of 300 subscribers has been compiled.

Softback: 38 pages single sided not including cover (120 pages of artwork and text). Black and white throughout with spot colour cover. Trim size approx 205mm x 205mm. Printed on quality paper.

The edition will list the names of the 300 subscribers and each will be personally signed to the subscriber with an original ink sketch on the flyleaf. The book comes with a CD of music and songs written and performed by Finlay and Night Porter, each piece of music or song matches one of the 12 chapters in the book.

Price: $59 US dollars per copy (approx £29.50 plus p&p). English prices are subject to the US/Pound exchange rate.

Email your request to Finlay. No commitment required at this stage. We will contact you when the subscribers list is full with a quote on postage and packaging. You can then decide and we will go to print. Payment can be made by cheque or PayPal.

News

'Miss London' graphic novel

What is 'Miss London'?
It's a 120 page graphic novel in black and white. Each page has a single image on it together with text.

What is it about?
It's the thoughts and feelings of a group of disintegrating twenty-somethings who live in London. The connection between them is that they are all searching for the same thing... it's the same story told through the eyes of dozens of different people... it's a very emotionally charged story about love... and London.

A lot of the writing reads like poetry...
I used a lot of song lyrics that I've written for Night Porter over the years. It was fascinating to re-interpret them into a different medium. It made a lot of sense...

A lot of it seems quite personal
In a round about sort of way perhaps... the central character is not a story teller but a story collector... which is how I see myself, but the comparisons stop there. True, I visited a lot of memories of places and people I knew and still know... but its not strictly biographical, more of a collage which is fundamental to the way I find a story... the process of finding the story becomes a story in itself.

It's different from the styles you use in your practical art books...
It was a real breakthrough for me... a breath of fresh air. I was doing it on planes and trains and buses. It's a fluid, mobile approach. I'm really happy with the format and it's given me the confidence to tackle new material which is more narrative based. I've got shelves full of this stuff and masses of material for high concept period graphic novels and films that I've been developing for years. Eventually I just stripped it right back to a sketchbook and pen and ink which I haven't done for twenty years. I just started producing drawings one at a time without any consideration for structure, story-line, formula, character... none of the conventions - I just let it flow out, grabbing random notes from my diaries and unfinished songs. Whenever I started trying to order it into a coherent structure my wife, Janette, would stop me, saying "keep going as you are, let people draw their own conclusions about it". Eventually, a pattern began to emerge, it started to make sense of itself and it crystallized into a book with a strong message. The real reward is in that I'm getting an emotional response from most of the people who read it... its an amazing feeling... producing something that people can really connect with on a personal level... something that's quite easy with music but very hard to do with graphic novels.

When can we get a copy of Miss London?
I had no plans to publish when I started it - but a limited edition of 300 signed copies with an original illo and an audio CD is being produced by subscription available directly from me. There'll soon be a website where you can download new chapters as they come.

What's next?
I'm currently working on a serial featuring the character Subway Slim (who makes a cameo in Miss London). Subway is a sort of 'myth hunter' who kills himself and becomes a 'type' of ghost in order to pursue his lost love into the world of the supernatural (a world collectively known as 'The Shadow Tribes'). On the way he discovers he has a higher calling which brings him into contact with familiar and obscure characters and stories from folklore and myth. I'm fascinated by the grey area between myth and the pure urban reality of stories like Miss London - the way fantasy and reality seem to overlap in our lives and I created this premise as a vehicle for that... so I can flick between the two - I love the harsh realities and emotional subtleties of human relationships and history but I also love the idea of telling stories in worlds where anything is possible. I would describe it as 'Corto Maltese' meets 'Hellboy' with a vague hint of Philip Pullman.

You say its a serial... can we expect more?
I've been searching for this character for years. Its been my life-long dream to do a Corto, or a Tintin or a Steve Canyon. I've found the vehicle I've been looking and training for so this one will run and run. Subway embarks on a long journey... in the first episode he starts in London and ends in Sweden, the second episode takes him on to Finland and in the third he reaches St Petersburg in Moscow. The first book ends with the fourth episode and a major change... possibly in Estonia... we'll see, it partly depends on where I end up in the course of my research!

Interview by Natasha Grey.