BugPowder Reviews Contraband

A nice bit of ruthless, constructive feedback from John Robbins at BugPowder.


"The antithesis of po-faced comics with inferred depth – which sidestep the writing process courtesy of the tolerance and inherent appeal of this seductive medium – Contraband insistently exhibits meaning and aspires to provide a substantial reading experience..."

John reviews all sorts of Irish/UK small press comics which can found on his blog here.

Contraband Reviewed in Financial Times

We're quite pleased to see that Contraband has been given a short but favourable review by James Lovegrove in this weekend's edition of the London Financial Times. You can read the review at FT.com


Contraband is now in the shops and available to order online from the likes of Amazon, Play, Tesco and Slg's own online store.

Contraband Review at Newsarama

Here are a few words from Michael May regarding the comic...


"There are rewards for those willing to stick with the book. For one thing, Behe has a great voice in all that text. People in Contraband don’t talk the way real people do, but that’s just fine. They talk better than real people do. They tend to go on and on (Tucker especially loves to speechify and given that he’s usually threatening people at the same time, there were several instances when I wondered why someone didn’t just jump him mid-lecture), but they sure are entertaining as they’re doing it."

Contraband Review from Oakland Tribune

Randy Myers from the Oakland Tribune threw a few fine words our way in his monthly comics column:



“Cautionary tales about our insatiable appetite to download the misery and humiliation of others have turned into a telling genre unto itself. Behe's twisty take stands out because it's laden with surprises and has an urgent immediacy to it.”

Contraband Review at The Crack

Very cool to see Contraband picked up a recommendation from Newcastle indie mag the Crack this week.


"There aren’t too many graphic novels around that successfully engage with modern anxieties but Contraband is one such work...the real focus - the foreground white noise of a society raised on cheap thrills."

Contraband Podcast Interview at CGS

Last week, the guys at ComicGeekSpeak touched base to discuss Contraband's themes, background and general stuff about how it all came together.



A bit of background into Contraband's dialogue development:

"TB - I wanted the dialogue to mimic the behaviour of youths posting bits of conversation on mobile social networking channels. Looking through these mobile forums, I’m amazed how many users kind of “step up onto their soapbox” - offering up rather raw and lengthy opinions on how they feel about a specific topic. These meaty (and often passionate) digressions are accompanied with personal signatures, banners - perhaps some sort of animated icon or other digital representation of themselves. The characters in Contraband (active, ambitious, mobile savvy) fit into this category of forum users so it seemed appropriate to bring this across into the comic narrative.”

France Comics Interview

Met this top chap Christophe Colin from France Comics a few months back at Angouleme who scribed a quick interview of Contraband's development. Folks keen to see a french version of a Contraband sample can drop us a line and we'll get a free pdf off to you asap...

Contraband Preview at The First Post

Here's another short review of Contraband at The First Post...


This is an extract from Danny Graydon's review:

"Eschewing the dark, moody artwork that typically accompanies such stories, Elliott adopts an engaging clear-line style which slickly captures the fast-paced netherworld of phone-video..."

Contraband Interview at Comixology

Peter Jaffe from the comics news and review site Comixology has an interview with us HERE.


Here's is an extract from the interview:

Comixology: In reading Contraband, one of the first comparisons that comes to mind is "A Clockwork Orange". It's a world where kids have taken to committing random acts of violence in order to entertain themselves. Could you tell us about the influences that went into Contraband? And, what inspired you to tell this story?

Thomas: The idea came about while working on a user-generated project at a UK mobile operator. Some sneaky kid had upskirting a woman on an underground train and posted the clip on our network. So while top management were blowing their nut and the tech team began implementing an age-verification layer, I was thinking how some nasty bloke could probably offer a good revenue share to motivate sh*t-disturbing kids to send in more.
I thought up this violent channel called Contraband, a sort of "urban theatre", where youths prowl city streets secretly film strangers then post sensational, erotic and violent mobile videos. So men can no longer shower in gyms. Women in dresses avoid seats on trains. Teens run daily exhibitionist mobile blogs featuring candid clips of close friends and family members. User-generated mobile spy-cam content becomes big business as society demands increasingly radical videos.
But it's also tough to police corrupt individuals like Tucker because it's not in the mobile operator's best interest to do so. They've beaten the government (ID card), internet community portals and banks in the race to create robust personal profile to track people, sell them products, invade their privacy for commercial gain. So it all kind of spirals out of control...

Bringing Contraband into Belgium

Scanning through the bdangloume.fr site I can see that this is indeed one monster show - it is said to be 2nd largest comic event in the world with nearly 1/2 million fans invading this tiny french town east of Bordeaux. And I'm amazed how many small indy Belgian pubishers say they'll show up looking for unique albums of sequential art. So we've created a Flemish/Dutch version with the help of a solid chap I met on comicspace.com: Rembrand Le Compte - who was nice enough to translate the first few pages into Flemish for us last Fall. He's currently working on his own sequential art and reporting on the latest and greatest of the thriving Belgian market - so when you get a sec, go check him out here.

Contraband Featured on ReadYourselfRaw

Woke up this morning to discover ReadYourselfRaw has selected Contraband as it's profile preview GN on it's monthly cover. RYR is a favourite site of ours so to have such a top billing is fantastic indeed! Check out www.readyourselfraw.com to see all of Feb '08's upcoming GN & comic titles along with critical reviews and top artist bios.

Final Back Cover Art for Contraband GN

We finally wrapped up the final touches on the graphic novel and skipped it all off to Slave Labor Graphics over the weekend. Man, what a insane amount of work (but so rewarding!) In the end, Phil came up with this new back cover which I believe does a top job reflecting the mood and tone of the story. Guess that big promotion bit kicks off this week...


Issue One is now available at www.eyemelt.com.

Contraband Available in Dec' 07 Diamond Previews

Contraband is now available for order in the December issue of Diamond Preview magazine. It's a fairly meaty pack this month so head into the middle bit to page 197 onto the AMAZE INK/ SLG section, and you'll see our order number: DEC07 3339

Review of Contraband Issue 1 at Paperback Reader

Avid comic fangirl Moya from Oz dropped me a quick line to say she took some time to review (a very early version) of Contraband. Unfortunately she was working from a raw version we first sent out to a few folks last May to gauge early feedback - we've since sorted out those "rough bits" she picked out in the original sample. That being said, we're pleased she liked what she saw on the whole. Check it out at Paperback Reader.

Contraband Issue #2 Arriving in December

Issue 2 of Contraband will be appearing on Eyemelt in a few weeks. Watch for some upcoming promo/review stuff with Publishers Weekly and an interview for a cool Canada University rag. And here's a preview page from Issue #3 showing why you might think twice about stashing your mobile into your front pocket.

Persepolis and Promoting Contraband

What a top night out - the ICA's final night of Comica in London was one of the best eves I've had in months. Meeting the chaps who created the top webcomic (& now graphic novel collection) Shooting War - followed by a bit of Contraband promo chat over beers with some of the UK's coolest comic types - concluded with the premiere screening of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (this is one fantastic movie). Even got in a quick chat reflecting on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival with Paul Gravett - who was one of the guys heading up this year's Comica event (his site www.paulgravett.com has plenty of info on this and other upcoming festivals).


It looks like the Angloueme festival won't be just fun and games after all. Our pro pass aps were approved so we're heading into the trade fair early to seek out out some foreign publishers for Contraband. Already we've had an interesting chat with a company in the Philippines who's keen to get a trade edition out bookshops/newstands in that country - perhaps sometime in the summer (have to get the english version finished first) In any case, watch for Contraband 6-pages previews in Dutch, Japanese and French popping up here at www.contrabandcomic.com over the next few weeks..

Talking Cabs & Contraband with Dave Sim

A few months back while visiting the folks in my hometown of North Bay, I blasted 350kms down the 400 to check out the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. It was well worth the trip - along with meeting some cool SLG and other comic artists, after (more than) a few pints I managed to get babbling about my old uni town, my part time cabbie job and this funny/cheesy/giant bar called Lulu's with Dave Sim. It was very cool to meet Dave but the truth is I vaguely remember our chat. Thankfully, Dave's decided to recap this rather blurry conversation on his blog (www.davesim.blogspot.com.). Kinda' happy I wasn't that much of a mess!...T


"T.J. Behe who had had a few by that point came up and struck up a conversation and gave me his business card. He's doing a title with Phil Elliott (there's a blast from the U.K. past) called Contraband which will be coming out from Slave Labor "in early `08".

Turned out he used to drive a cab here in town and we started reminiscing about Lulu's. Used to be a K Mart and they gutted the place and turned it into a bar. That's right, a K Mart-sized bar so you know it was the 80s. It was in the Guiness Book of World Records for The World's Longest Bar. I saw Jerry Lee Lewis there, James Brown…a very unhappy Bay City Rollers revival (missed that one did you?), Elvis, Elvis, Elvis (three impersonators). It was absolute heaven for cab drivers since it was way out on the highway so, as he said, wherever the customer was going it was going to cost at least $20 to get there. It wasn't unusual to have 50 cabs lined up at closing time.

The thing that really bothered me was that the place was so huge (how huge was it, Dave?) it was SO huge that if you downed a drink and just walked from one side to the other, you had sobered up by the time you got there. The thing I liked about it was it was mostly civilians who didn't get out much so you could usually get pretty close to the stage without having to step on anyone. I was about ten feet away for Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown.

Anyway, T.J. is probably hoping that I've completely forgotten him (as you always do when you meet someone when you've had a few) and lost his business card, but no such luck, mate. Check out the work in progress at www.contrabandcomic.com."

Contraband Cell Phone Gun

We've had a few mails come in regarding the phone gun design on our front cover (the artwork highlights some key features and functionality of a mobile device owned by the story's antagonist Tucker Scott.) Here's the background:

About 8 months, I had a chat with my collegue Marcus Hohl, O2 UK's Device Specification guru about some cops who caught a few drug dealers with a .22 calibre mobile hand gun. I knew he could do better so I asked Marcus to cook up ideas for your worst nightmare mobile weapon.

A week later, he came back with a layout so clever, we kept his orginal design for the cover and even scripted a few extra panels into the story describing how the weapon's functionality.

Here's how the page came out (#29 of Contraband Issue I which you can now download over on Slave Labor's digital comic site http://www.eyemelt.com/.)

Kicking off Contraband Issue # 3

Some manic page-development action happening over the past few weeks means we've tied-off the second issue and have started developing Issue # III (you can grab Issue # I at http://www.eyemelt.com/ now) It also means we'll have the graphic novel ready for comic retailers to order from their Diamond December Preview magazine (very cool indeed!)

Here's a neat little action sequence Phil drafted up a few days back from the upcoming final Issue...

Review of Contraband Issue #1 from AICN Comics

A few months back, Ambush Bug from AICN Comics offered up his insights an early draft of Contraband Issue #1...

"Sometimes a book comes along and just knocks you in the gut. IN a good way, mind you. CONTRABAND is a story set in the very near future. Reality TV has grown to massive proportions and technology has advanced to match it. Everything can be recorded with camera phones and immediately uploaded to websites for all to access. Privacy is an obsolete concept and the public has grown hungry for the next shocking thing and their fifteen minutes of fame. This story is a smart and scary vision of where we all may be headed.

At times, the story can get a bit techy, but it only disrupts the momentum of the story slightly. I found the tech-speak to be extremely interesting because it is such a major part of the story. This Orwellian tale is not to be taken lightly. You can tell the writer has done his research. According to writer TJ Behe’s bio, he’s a digital creator who has worked for the BBC, Playboy, and MTV, so it looks like he knows what he is talking about.

The art is equally powerful in its simplicity. Artist Phil Elliot does a great job of evoking powerful imagery with very few lines. Despite the attention to technology, this story has a lot of heart. There is a passion for the material and a moral lesson beneath it all. This is the type of story that will make you think about yourself and the direction humanity is going with its addiction to technology, voyeurism, and fame. - Ambush Bug"
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/32680

You can download Issue #1 now at http://www.eyemelt.com/ or pre-order the 144-page graphic novel at Amazon (ISBN number 978-1593621018).