Sean Azzopardi's excellent graphic novel Twelve Hour Shift tells a tale familiar to many of us. A story of someone with creative drive and ambition forced to take a soul-sucking, dead-end job to make ends meet. In this case, comic artist Steve Jones finds himself working as a concierge and night porter in a block of luxury residential flats, suffering the slings and arrows of a mithering boss and jaded, lazy, alcoholic colleagues. He gets up before dawn, braves the horrors of public transport, spends his day being abused by clients and co-workers alive, while failing to motivate himself to steal many moments of creative expression along the way, then returns home to a lonely cold-water flat with only his cat for company.
And yet... he keeps going, because writing and drawing those comics means that much to him. It's all he wants to do. And even if he achieves nothing else with his life, better that than denying himself that creative outlet at all.
If you can understand where Steve Jones - and Sean Azzopardi - are coming from, you can share their misery by clicking here. It's much better than going to work.
On the surface, Brian James Freeman's novella The Painted Darkness tells the story of an artist haunted by a terrifying event from his childhood who finds himself having to once again face the monsters living in his cellar. It's been compared by some to Stephen King, which I always think is a kind of lazy shorthand for "horror in a real-world setting", but I couldn't see much of King in Freeman's writing. The story is an extended metaphor about why we're driven to flog ourselves at unappreciated creative endeavours (in Freeman's words, "we're painting against the darkness") dressed up as a perfectly enjoyable little monster-in-the-woodshed thriller. Both moving and gripping, it's a read-in-one-sitting affair that stays with you for all the right reasons.
