Paul Pope on Battling Boy

Ahead (way, way ahead probably) of it's release, here's Paul Pope guest blogging for 1st Second about his book Battling Boy, first mentioned in 2006 as coming out in 2007 (hmm, maybe not).

Battling Boy is the son of a god or a super hero—it is left unspecified—who comes down from the top of a mountain (or rather, from inside a cloud/UFO contraption/contrivance from above a mountain top) at this father's behest, in order to rid a giant city from it's plague of monsters. Hercules had his labors, Batman has his Gotham, Battling Boy has his Monstropolis.

Monstropolis is a city the size of an entire continent—and it is absolutely overrun with monsters. These are horrible, Grimm's fairytale, Beowulf-ish monsters, awful things. Child-stealers. Plus some of the vampires and mummies and wolfmen we remember from the old black and white Hollywood horror films. Which—if you remember—aren't very funny. And they don't all like each other, either. Even a monster can't stand another monster, this has been proven time and time again.

And from there to his blog Pulp Hope, and thence to his Flickr. Both are sources of lovely stuff, such as this silkscreen for an article on comics and films: