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Rian Hughes Has A New Novel Coming Out. And It Is Bigger Than (Almost) Everyone Else's

Rian Hughes has many lives. He is a comic book creator, and has worked on everything from Dare with Grant Morrison, The Science Service, and the upcoming Numbers from IDW. He is also a letterer and designer, including many Marvel, DC, Image and Valiant logos and designs that can be found on many comics on the stands right now, as well as the iconic Forbidden Planet logo that is one of the more well-known British brands, with the plastic bags featuring it parading around the city and even being dragged on stage in the Rocky Horror Show. He also creates fonts and has been celebrated for his work with typography. And his design work has seen hundreds of times over the decades in British advertising. And despite having so many strings to his bow, fans of each particular string are rarely aware of the other, equally celebrated strings. Hopefully that won't happen to his next book, which combines so many of them together.

Because clearly, with all this other work. he would have no time to write a novel, let alone one that's longer than any other novel released of late aside from Alan Moore's Jerusalem (which Rian Hughes also worked on the design for) but that's exactly what he's done. XX is a novel about the receiving and interpretation of an alien signal, picked up by scientists, and the way it affects both society and culture. It is also incredibly playful, going on strange tangents such as a poem about an idea arguing with the person who is having it, mixing up typography to tell stories and earning it the subtitle, A Novel, Graphic. Consider it a cross between Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud and AA Milne's The House At Pooh Corner, over many, many, many more pages.

Ryan is currently busying through a final draft and publication is expected soon. A possible quote from Grant Morison described it as actually doing what James Joyce tried to do with Ulysses but failed. Hughes is debating whether or not to put that on the back cover…

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