Thought Bubble: The Great Salt Lake by Matt Taylor

Sometimes a little necessity is a good thing.

Necessity birthed my first self penned and drawn comic – The Great Salt Lake – which is debuting at Thought Bubble this coming weekend. When I booked my place at this years convention, I was taking baby steps into the world of comics – working on Zero with Ales Kot, and drawing that Deep State cover artwork you can see on the advertising banners on this page. I had a few other seeds of projects that I thought might develop by November but they have all taken a little longer than expected to bear fruit and there was a danger of attending a comic book convention with a table displaying only a single issue of sequential art. This just would not do, so I started to write and sketch out an idea that had been rattling around my head for a while, because I needed something else to justify my place at the convention. I would have other wares to show, but this was a comic con – I had to have a comic.

 brought forth the need for The Great Salt Lake, but the story was something I'd had circling my head for years. A man cast adrift on an endless sea, searching for a way home to his lost love. I knew how the story started, with a burning ship in the night, and I knew how it would end (I won't spoil that here – you'll have to read the book). Like the nameless shipwrecked castaway that the story follows, I let myself float. About halfway through writing I realised that I hadn't penned any dialogue, but I felt the pictures were telling the story on their own. Ironically, adding words would take away from the tone I was trying to strike. Who would a man lost at sea speak to?

The finished book is something very special for me. It arrived back from the printers the same week that my baby daughter was born (in most weeks it would have been the best thing to have happened but this time it would have to settle for being second best). It is about love, and above all hope.

You can find it, and me, at table 16 in the TB Teepee (alongside the guys from Mondo). The Great Salt Lake is priced at £5. If you can't make it to the convention, the book is available for preorder at http://matttaylordraws.bigcartel.com and will be shipping at the end of November

A man is lost at sea, a survivor of a sinking ship, searching for his lost love and a way home.

28 pp / colour cover / b&w interior