AUDIT OF WEIRD: FEBRUARY 2026 / WEEK THREE: Half-term week. Had to pivot from deep-think work to donkey-work. Forged ahead on dialogue for Hawk the Slayer last week, so this week I could plough through the monotony of my own editorial notes, panel descriptions, and writing up character/monster designs. I frontload the latter on the first few pages of my comic scripts so they don’t weigh down the panel descriptions later on and the artist knows from the get-go if there’s any heavy design work involved.

Durham Red: Hungry City got announced in the 2000 AD newsletter. I’ve said enough for now about Red’s struggles to find a balance between her innate bloodlust and her desire to do better. So, this one’s a future-noir tale about other people trying to take advantage of her bad reputation. Fun-fact: We based her wardrobe for this one on Sharon Stone’s kick-ass vinyl skirt and jacket from Casino, but with combat-boot accessories.

Enjoyed Wuthering Heights. Still in awe of John DeVore’s movie reviews. (“Fennell doesn’t take Emily Brontë’s beloved gothic romance about obsession and class very seriously, at least for most of the movie, and that seeming lack of respect is exciting.”) Exciting, yes! DeVore always cuts through the fog of hype and outrage. You can feel the moment he plugs into a movie and conveys that initial spark of true emotional contact. If you love great movie-writing, check out his ‘150-word Movie Reviews’ 150wordreviews.substack…

Sword and sorcery veteran David C. Smith commented on one of my S&S essays about the need for the genre to maintain its outsider status. To be embraced by the mainstream would kill it. He’s hit the nail on the head there, I feel. It’s a genre that thrives in the margins and champions the marginalised.

Fifty pages into Bernard Cornwell’s powerful Arthurian opus The Winter King (1995) while I paused to study the opening few pages of George R. R. Martin’s The Hedge Knight (1998, the first novella in the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms trilogy). Martin writes from what Ursula K. Le Guin would call the ‘involved [omniscient] author’ perspective, the prose coming from Dunk’s PoV but littered with subtle flourishes that could only come from the author. It’s the same storyteller mode as Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, but in a much lower register, his tone less hyperbolic and look-at-me. I’ve yet to read Game of Thrones (1996), though I’m left wondering if GRRM used the same subtle world-inferring technique and how much his influence on the genre lay in his making grandiose fantasy novels more accessible to readers beyond the fantasy hardcore.

Off to play Dune: War for Arrakis tonight. Looks like a beast of a boardgame.

For more pages from the secret diary of a comic-book hack, check out AUDIT OF WEIRD on his Notes feed…

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