Artithmeric 9 Issue #2

14 This edition’s cover has been produced for us by Tom Williams of Creative Crypt. At Artithmeric, we’ve long been fans of Tom’s striking and distinctive artwork and his clever storytelling skills. The first time I saw his work it reminded me of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton in their late 1960s/ early 1970s heyday. It has a real 1960s counter-culture vibe, but in a Goth environment - absolutely fascinating. His Bloody Plum books feature Boy-Tango, a character who, believe it or not, he first devised for Inktober 2014. Boy-Tango and his father Chips, who just happens to be a talking cat, soon featured as a regularly published strip which by 2015 Tom tells me he had already grown tired of. He felt it was too much like a derivative of Adventure Time, albeit an adult version of it, and so he relaunched the strip as Bloody Plum and centred it around Boy-Tango. Those strips then morphed into his latest project, the Sagas series, book #1 of which has been published as an Artithmeric edition this year. The Sagas series looks to us as though it will develop into a long-running thread of Tom’s work and eventually will surely yield some graphic novel compilations somewhere down the line - we do hope so anyway!