The History of Deadend23 Comics

I've only ever had a modest comic book collection with titles ranging from Spiderman, The X-Men Superman, Batman, 2000AD, Starlord, Marvel's Star Wars, Warlord and even the Beano and Whizzer & Chips.  I used to draw as a kid and sometimes made up my own comics.

When I left school, I took a few jobs before finding myself working for a t-shirt printing company in 1992.  I enjoyed working there (although the money was shit), and found myself surrounded by great characters.  I based my first comic, Deadenders, a page-long story about the mundanity of working in the factory, on my workmates.  They loved it and wanted to see more.  So I began doing more one-page episodes.  One of my friends there, Vinnie, was in a death metal band, Morphosis.  So I did a 15 page comic titled Morphosis Death Machine (A Deadenders Special).  This went down very well with Vinnie and the other members of the band.

Other friends who saw Morphosis Death Machine wanted a comic based on them too.  I was going to do a comic called Friends, but a new tv show had begun with the same name so I called my comic A Few Good Friends.  These comics began again as one page stories or episodes and the plots often included alien invasions.

Meanwhile, I had a baby with my girlfriend and was working hard.  I stopped making comics for quite a while.  We had a second baby and got married.  I had a new job now, in a distribution centre for a huge supermarket chain.  Again, I found myself surrounded by a bunch of unique characters.  I began drawing The Tesco Chainsaw Massacre and released it in one page episodes for a few months in 2005.  My workmates loved it and couldn't wait to find out who the masked killer was.  After Massacre, I tried to think of a follow-up and had written a script titled Night of the Living Ed.  But before I could begin drawing it, the warehouse closed down and I was made redundant.

Later that year, a friend of mine (one of A Few Good Friends) died from cancer.  She had written a poem called A Murdering Spree based on our group of friends.  I decided to adapt her poem for a comic in her memory.  I began working on it in November 2008 and finished it in March 2009.  A Murdering Spree is the first title from Deadend23 Comics.  I made a number of copies of it and it is available to buy in Dublin's Forbidden Planet.

It has been almost a year since A Murdering Spree and I have been thinking about new comics to put out.  I have written a script called Cross but I'm not 100% happy with it.  I am also toying around with doing a new Morphosis comic.

Welcome to
DEADEND23

Comics and Art of Paul Maxwell